Expanding my Web of Trust

I’ve persuaded my father into creating a key-pair for use with GnuPG. And because I’m such a trustworthy guy, he has signed my key :-)

It isn’t that easy to find somebody who uses GnuPG or PHP. In fact there’s only a little over 11,000 Danish keys on the public keyserver www.pgp.dk.

Anyway — I’ve started using the latest development version of my mail and newsreader Gnus. The development version is called Oort Gnus. The reason I switched from Gnus 5.8.8 was, that Oort Gnus has much better support for what is known as S/MIME. This is the format MUAs like mutt uses.

When using S/MIME, the first part in the mail has a Content-Type of application/pgp-encrypted. Then follows the encrypted text in a MIME part with a content-type of application/octet-stream. It’s the first part that tells Oort Gnus that it should be prepared to decrypt the message. Gnus 5.8.8 didn’t understand this, and was further confused by the application/octet-stream part which it (of course) didn’t think was text. But it works now: I can encrypt and decode mails, and verify signatures from others. If I’m missing a public key, then it will be fetched automatically.

One Comment

  1. Martin Geisler:

    I’ve since switched to a new key and have attended a keysigning party where I collected lots of signatures.

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